Digital Resilience to Normal Accidents in High-Reliability Organizations

Digital technologies play a dual role on organizational resilience. On one side, digital systems introduce new technological risks. On the other side, digital systems increase the performances in response to hazardous accidents. Normal Accident Theory (NAT) and High-Reliability Organization (HRO) provide useful ground to explain the dynamics of digital resilience. However, the two theories have been either used as alternatives or with one theory dominating the other. We posit that to fully understand digital resilience we need to integrate NAT and HRO concepts instead of using them in isolation. We conduct a bibliometric analysis to identify major themes and application domains characterizing HRO and NAT research. We look at similarities and differences between the two streams and we build an integrated framework for the analysis of digital resilience. With our systematic analysis of the NAT and HRO discourses we advance the current understanding on resilience in digitally enabled operations.